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For the sixth consecutive week, Kate Gosselin’s on the cover of Us Weekly. “Mommy You Are Mean” screams the headline, while her husband Jon declares, “Enough is Enough” on the cover of People. In Touch and Star are selling the Gosselins as well. Only the Enquirer has chosen an old standard for its cover, Brangelina, and even the most famous couple in the world had to share the front page, with, you guessed it, Jon Gosselin.
Up until a few months ago, chances were good-to-great that if you picked up a tabloid one of the following subjects would appear on the cover: Brangelina, Jennifer Aniston, TomKat or Britney Spears. But recently, the attractive, famous folk who have dominated gossip for years and years (even when, as with Aniston, the relevant story happened eons ago), have suddenly, ignominiously been shoved to the side by a rag-tag crew whose members include the Gosselins, Octomom, Susan Boyle and, to a certain extent, Michelle Obama... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I've been in Britain for a week now and really should be accustomed to the idiosyncratic standards of the mainstream U.K. press, but nevertheless I was surprised to wake up Sunday morning to hear the announcement of reality-TV star Jade Goody's death lead the BBC newscast. (This on Radio 4, the Beeb's flagship "intelligent speech" channel.) A Monday-morning trip to the corner newsagent confirms that Goody has received the full Princess Diana treatment—Stephen Fry, whose connection to Goody seems to have been appearing on a chat show with her "a year or so back" provided a very convenient sound bite, calling her "a kind of Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks." All the tabloids devote their covers to the "news" of Goody's death, as do several of the broadsheets. (The Times relegated Goody to a small reefer in the margin of its front page, but it stuck with the prevailing mood of ghoulishness by splashing a photograph of Sylvia Plath with her baby son Nicholas under the headline "Sylvia Plath's Son Commits Suicide.")
Although I grew up in a tabloid-reading British home, I'm shocked by the papers every time I come back here. The red-top tabs now seem to be pretty much devoid of news, with 95 percent of the paper devoted to stories about reality-show contestants, members of third-rate singing groups, and footballers' wives. And as the Goody treatment shows, the broadsheets are by no means immune. (Lest you dismiss the tabs as marginal nonsense, remember that the combined circulation of Britain's five "quality papers" is less than that of the Sun, the most popular tabloid.)
What seems weird, though, is that almost all the tabloid targets are female. Perhaps it's an odd corollary to the children's book phenomenon in which girls will read about boys, but boys won't read about girls: Male tabloid readers will happily flip through pages of fluff about pretty young female celebs, as will women readers, but readers with Y chromosomes won't hand over 30p for a paper full of stories about celebrity studs.
Of course, the American press isn't altogether immune, either. I notice that the New York Times has done more stories on Jade Goody than it has on Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, the party that won 62 seats in the 2005 British election.
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I'm afraid I have to agree that on the vapid-to-moving continuum, I’d put Bristol Palin’s interview a lot closer to the vapid side of the spectrum. It wasn’t just the likes and the ums; that’s standard-issue and I do it, too. But I don’t understand how someone who clearly wants to take on an advocacy role has given no thought at all to what it is she wants to advocate. As several of you have already noted, “wait 10 years” and “abstinence is not realistic” is just not a public service message. It’s confusing, if not totally contradictory. Now I don’t think I agree, Willa, that this is attention-seeking or career-planning on her part. Bristol mostly looks like she’d rather be pulling a dogsled through the tundra than giving this interview. I think she really does want her life to be an example to other teens. But since she doesn’t seem to know what her message is, the net effect seems to be completely unrealistic and chaotic. (“I take care of him all the time except when I’m at school"?!). And Gov. Palin’s glossy observation—that having a baby at 18 is very unfortunate but also very fortunate—only contributes to the sense that the only message here is: “Don’t do what I did. Unless you do.”
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Jessica wondered earlier why Bristol Palin would agree to do an interview at all, now that the feeding frenzy is largely over, and posited Bristol's telling her overbearing mama to step off. I buy that, but I think there's an even simpler reason she might have decided to sit down with Greta: She wants the attention. Bristol mentions a number of times that having a baby isn't at all "glamorous." That doesn't sound like news, but I think it might have been to Bristol. She repeats the insight a number of times, enough for it to seem like one of her big revelations about having a newborn. (It's also a nod to the insidious power of the same tabloids that Bristol dismisses as trash. Where else would one get the idea that glamour has anything to do with child-rearing except from watching the likes of Ashlee Simpson, Gwen Stefani, and Angelina do it in $500 dollar jeans?) Greta Van Susteren may not be glamorous like Vogue, but she's chic-er than nothing (or what most 18-year old mothers have access to).
I was also struck by how often Bristol talked about how having a career would make raising a baby easier. Keeping herself in the public eye is a pretty savvy, if yucky, career strategy. Being notorious has already proved to be a viable career option for some. If Bristol seems unlikely to follow in Paris' exact footsteps, she can at least use her fame as a springboard to something else, be it advocacy or handbags. But she's got to extend her 15 minutes in order for that move to work.
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